Assessing Your SEO Vitals

You have a website…now what? It’s time for an SEO site checkup! Search engine optimization is equally if not more important than site design. What good is a beautiful, intuitive site if no one can find it? SEO can seem daunting for the novice business owner, but fear not, if you follow these simple steps you will be done before you know it. Here are some simple tips for improved SEO performance.

How to test your SEO Performance?

Crawl the site for link errors:

I recommend using Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider because it’s thorough, accurate and FREE for up to 500 URI’s which should be enough for most non-e-commerce sites. Determine if 404 errors need to be redirected or abandoned and fix any 500 server errors.

Site Performance:

Site Speed is a major ranking factor for Google so make sure your site aligns with Google’s best practice for site speed. There are a couple great tools to test site speed. Google provides a PageSpeed Insights tool and GTMetrix is also a great tool to find errors and suggested fixes for optimal SEO performance.

Site: Command is a feature offered in most search engines which allows you to check what pages on your site have been indexed and have the potential to show up in search results. In the results below you can see that Google has indexed 186 pages on our site. Keep in mind these results are not completely accurate but a rough estimate is all you need to spot check your SEO performance.

Content optimization is the number one ranking factor for Google, so how do you check if your content is up to snuff?

Choose relevant keywords and use them in your Title Tags, Meta Descriptions, and throughout your content.

Remove duplicate content. Duplicate content can hurt your ranking because Google cannot determine which page is more relevant if it says the same things as another page, so it will turn to another source to find the most relevant content for the searcher.

Content length is important! Google best practice is no less than 300 words of semantic, easily readable content. A valuable tool to find duplicate is a plagiarism checker. Small SEO Tools has a very useful one.

Ask yourself, “does this content offer value to the searcher?” This is obviously subjective, but site behavior such as bounce rate and session duration are good indicators or how your audience is reacting to your content.

These tips are simple but incredibly impactful tools to evaluate your SEO performance. This SEO Site Checkup will give you actionable feedback on how to improve your site for better search engine ranking and better audience interaction on your site.

To learn more, contact our experts at SocialSEO. Let us help take your business to the next level in the search engines, Social Media and PPC.